Not long ago, a Fifa insider sent me a message: "We changed our rules because of you." Intrigued, I asked him to explain. Three years ago, I announced I was running for Fifa president as the People’s Candidate, a voice for the world’s common fan. My platform was simple enough: I would support common-sense reforms (goal-line technology, term limits for Fifa officials, finally bringing women into Fifa governance) and do a WikiLeaks on Fifa, releasing every internal document to the public so we could find out how clean or unclean the organisation really was in the wake of the dubious votes for the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.

Fifa officials like to talk about how it’s a great democracy, but most great democracies don’t have one-candidate elections, as Fifa had for its presidency in 2007 (and, it would turn out, in 2011 too). My campaign was a bit like the writer Norman Mailer’s run for mayor of New York City in 1969 – half-serious, half-satire – and we had fun at Sports Illustrated producing a slick campaign video.

We surveyed our readers to ask who they would elect if given the chance and I got 95% per cent of the vote, while incumbent Sepp Blatter got 2% and challenger Mohamed bin Hammam got 3%. I wasn’t naive – my appeal had less to do with anything about me than it did with public dissatisfaction around the world with Blatter and every other Fifa hack candidate.

That was the point – I had every right to run for president under Fifa's rules at the time. As I had discovered, anyone could announce his candidacy, but to become an official candidate on the ballot you had to obtain a public nomination from at least one of Fifa's 208 national federations by the deadline (two months before the election).

Blatter had already been nominated by the FA of Somalia, the world’s most corrupt country according to Transparency International, so I was aiming for one of the world’s least corrupt nations to nominate me. Over the next six weeks, I ended up contacting some 150 associations and received responses from countries big (Australia and the US) and small (Iceland, Dominica and Macedonia) and somewhere in between (Sweden, Chile, Ireland and Israel). They were all friendly, but none had the guts to nominate me. There was too much fear of negative blowback from Fifa.

I did more than 60 interviews with media outlets from 20 countries as well as the BBC, CNN and Reuters. (Sample question from the Shanghai Morning Post: “Did anyone think you were joking or that you were a madman?”) The Economist wrote a story on the Fifa election with this line: “Grant Wahl, an American journalist, has some good ideas but no chance at all.”

Finally, with only a week to go before the nomination deadline, Sports Illustrated sent me to the Uefa Congress in Paris. There, I had a meeting with one of the top officials from a World Cup-winning federation. Our conversation started off straightforward enough. “Why won’t the US federation nominate you?” he asked. “They’re like everyone else,” I said. “They fear the negative reaction down the road from Blatter and Fifa.” Then he explained his own association's position, one that was influenced not just by Blatter but also by Uefa president Michel Platini. “Tomorrow at the Uefa Congress, Blatter will announce that he will not run in 2015,” he said. “Platini wants to run in 2015, so Platini will ask all the big European nations to support Blatter this year. We don’t like Blatter that much, but now we will owe Michel Platini as well.”

The problem, he explained, was that nominating a candidate for Fifa president would be a public declaration – subject to punishment from Blatter and Platini – while the actual vote would be a secret ballot. “We would be more likely to vote for you in the election than to nominate you,” he told me. “Nominating you is impossible.”

And so it went. No federation was willing to nominate me, including England, who at least made a statement by abstaining during the official election as a snub to Blatter. And while my campaign had to end at that point, I was still proud of what it had achieved. The message I wanted to send got out.

Ordinary fans in countries around the world talked a little bit more about the absurdities of Fifa’s electoral process. They asked why their voices don’t matter and why so few people challenge the unpopular status quo. They asked why the leaders of Fifa don’t make common-sense reforms that would give the world’s greatest sport the clean and respected administration it deserves. And, in time, Blatter himself would support some of my reform suggestions, including goal-line technology and the addition of women to the Fifa executive committee for the first time. (He still hasn’t seen the light on term limits.)

In the end, it was clear that not even a world-renowned outsider candidate – not Kofi Annan, not Bill Clinton – would have been able to win a Fifa presidential election, or likely even be nominated. And sure enough, outsider candidates would be impossible today. As my insider friend told me, Fifa have changed the rules in the wake of my campaign; candidates now need to be formally nominated by five football associations, not one, and, the clincher, you have to have worked in a federation for at least two of the five years before the election. In some ways, Fifa has reformed. But in others it’s the same organisation it always was.